by G. M. Ford
“Kids grow up,” she said.
“And become teenagers…and get out of control and crash the family truck…and get arrested, bring a lot of unwanted attention to the happy little haven.”
“They start building a freeway in your backyard.”
“Time to flap your wings and fly off,” Corso said.
“But she leaves alone,” Dougherty said. “In the pictures, it’s always two angels flying off together.”
“So who’s the other angel?” Warren asked.
“No idea,” Corso said. “Maybe some kind of alter ego she walks around with or something. With her psychological profile, god only knows.”
“Like an imaginary friend.”
“Something like that maybe. Or some imaginary character who comes to her rescue when things get tough.”
“Or the other way around,” Warren chipped in. “Maybe she sees herself as the rescuer rather than the rescued.”
“Rescuing who?” Dougherty asked.
“She’s got no real family left other than Rodney and Tommie,” Corso said.
“And they think she’s dead.”
“So…who’s left to rescue?”
“Who knows,” Corso said with a shrug. “Maybe…” And then he stopped, as if listening to distant voices. “You got a map of the whole United States?” he asked Warren.
Warren said he thought so, and after half a minute of rummaging around in the driver’s door pocket, produced another map. Unfolded, it covered most of the dashboard. A minute later, Corso grunted and laughed a private laugh.
“What a bunch of dummies we are,” he said.
“What’d you find?” she asked.
“An angel.” He pointed at the map. Dougherty leaned over the seat to see: New Jersey. “Look,” Corso said. “It starts here, in north Jersey. Right?”
“Yeah.”
He ran his finger across the map. Westward, along the southern shores of the Great Lakes. “Tommie de Groot stole a set of license plates here in Elgin, Illinois. Right?” When nobody disagreed, he went on. “They found the car abandoned here.” He pointed again. North and west. “Lake Geneva, Michigan. State Route 83.”
“Holy shit,” Dougherty said.
Corso’s finger moved again. “You follow 83 north…and where are you?”
“Midland, Michigan,” they said in unison.
Her father lay on his back, his head stuck up under the stove. “Hand me the big orange wrench,” he said. Sarah rooted around in the toolbox and came out with a heavy pipe wrench. “This one?”
“That’s it.”
She handed the wrench to her father. When she straightened up and looked out the kitchen window toward the highway, the blue-and-white mail truck was pulling away from their mailbox. She bent at the waist and shook his foot. “Mail’s here, Papa,” she said. “Can I take the car down and get it?”
He set the wrench on the floor and pushed himself out from under the stove. He looked around. “Where’s your mama?” he asked.
Sarah jerked her finger over her shoulder. “She’s out in the barn with Pinhead.”
“You better not let her hear you say that.”
“Can I?”
“You hear me?”
“I heard.” She hopped from one foot to the other. “Can I?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
She skipped across the floor and plucked the keys from their hook next to the refrigerator. “Hey,” her father said.
“I know…be careful.”
“I don’t want to be havin’ to listen to her if you put a dent in that old car.”
“I don’t want to listen to her at all.”
He wagged a grimy finger at the girl. “She’s your mama. You don’t talk about her that way…you understand me?”
“Yes, Papa,” she said before running out the door.
He watched as Sarah got into the car and rolled slowly down the driveway toward the mailbox half a mile away, then lay back down and grabbed the wrench.
The kitchen door burst open. She stepped into the room. Hands on hips.
“What did I tell you about letting that damn girl drive the car?”
He got to his feet. “She’s a good little driver,” he said.
“She’s not old enough.”
“She will be soon enough.”
“I told you before…”
“Yeah,” he said. “And before that and before that…”
He looked out the window again. Sarah was on her way back. “Look,” he said, pointing, “she’s doin’ just fine.”
She stormed from the room, slamming the door hard on her way out. He walked over to the door and gazed out. He watched as Sarah brought the car to a halt in the yard. Watched her make it halfway to the door before his wife snatched the keys from her hand and began shouting at her. When she raised her hand, he turned away.
A minute later, Sarah burst into the kitchen. A bright red blotch covered her left cheek. “I hate her,” Sarah said. “I wish she was dead.”
He started to say something but changed his mind.
31
Corso had a map of Michigan spread out over the dashboard. “So,” he began, “you never told me how it was you managed to induce an FBI employee to call in sick and help you with your little investigation.”
“I showed him my artwork.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. I showed him my tattoos.”
“All of them?”
“As much as I could in a van…in broad daylight.” She took a hand off the wheel and waved it. “You know…without getting gyno and all.”
“Why in god’s name would you do a thing like that?”
“Because he wanted to see them.”
“You bribed—”
“I traded.”
“You seduced an FBI field operative into helping you…by exposing yourself to him. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“What I’m telling you is that without Warren making some calls, we wouldn’t know a damn thing about Nancy Anne Goff, and we sure as hell wouldn’t be here in Michigan looking to find her ass.”
“I don’t believe it.”
She shot him a sneer. “Ooooh…what is that I detect there?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve seen the show…re-member?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t be uh-huhing me.”
“Uh-huh.”
Corso folded the map. Didn’t get it right, so he unfolded it and tried again. When he failed a second time, he left it that way and stuffed it into the console.
To the west, out over the fields and the trees and the houses and barns, out at the extremes of eyesight, a line of power towers marched north and south down the middle of the peninsula, their steel stanchions shimmering in the cold dry distance.
“You given any thought to how it is Tommie de Groot knew his sister was still alive?” Dougherty asked a couple of miles later.
“At some point she must have come back to New Jersey for him. Nothing else makes sense. He was four years old the night the family burned up. Rodney said the kid lived in a foster home for a couple of years before he took him in. The foster family undoubtedly knew the story of how the de Groot family went up, so there’s no way she approaches them about seeing her little brother. At that point she’s supposed to have been dead for a couple of years. Got to be after he was living with Rodney that she shows up back in Jersey.”
“Had to be after she ran off from the Sisters too,” Dougherty added.
“So…it was either during that three and a half years we haven’t accounted for, or she went back and made herself known to him while she was living in Avalon.”
“Either way, Rodney had to know.”
“Absolutely.”
“So all that nonsense about Tommie going off every summer to visit friends in Idaho was just a smoke screen for visits to his sister.”
“For sure.”
“Why him?” Dougherty asked.
“No…why Tommie? She had two other brothers and a mother and father she poisoned and then burned to cinders. Why all the effort to keep in touch with a brother who’s thirteen or fourteen years her junior?”
“Maybe it’s that family thing of hers again,” Corso said.
“Hell of a risk, just to see somebody who was four years old the last time you laid eyes on them. Who might not even remember who in hell you are.” She looked over at Corso. “Happens to me all the time with my nieces and nephews back in Iowa. They barely recall me from year to year. Have to be prompted to remember my name.”
“Maybe, because of his age, Tommie was the only one she didn’t identify as being one of her abusers.” Corso winced. “Or maybe he was a victim too.”
“At four?”
“God only knows with that family.”
They drove in silence, until Dougherty broke the spell. “Or maybe little Tommie being in the hospital on the night of the fire wasn’t a coincidence after all.”
“You mean…like she arranged it?”
“Just a little touch of whatever she was about to feed the rest of the family. Off to the hospital and out of the way, so’s she can set up the rest of the scene.”
“Interesting thought…but like you said before, it’s a hell of a lot of trouble over a four-year-old kid she’d probably be better off without.”
“Not like she’s the most nostalgic person in the world either.”
“No kidding.”
“Who knows,” she said with a shrug.
A black-and-white road sign read “Midland 3 Miles.”
“What do we know about Midland, Michigan?”
“Can you say ‘Dow’?”
“As in chemical?”
“As in…owns the whole damn town.”
“Really?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been here before,” Corso said. “Back in ’89, I was working in North Carolina. Some sort of chemical spill killed a bunch of fish. Everybody thought it must have come from the new Dow Chemical plant. The Charlotte Observer sent me up to Midland to interview Dow corporate types.”
“You get anything from them?”
“Lunch.”
Dougherty eased the car into the right-hand lane and took the Route 20, Midland exit. A mile later, they hit the city limits. Midland: An All-American City, the sign said. “Take a left here,” Corso said. “Main Street is down that way. Down along the river.”
“What river is that?”
“The Tittabawassee,” Corso said. “I remember ’cause I could never spell the damn thing. Drove my editor nuts. Midland is where the Tittabawassee and the Chippewa Rivers converge. They got this weird bridge downtown, right at the confluence of the two rivers. Y shaped. Call it a tridge instead of a bridge because it forks out in the middle and you can go in either direction.”
She pulled the car to a stop at a traffic light. Pointed at a collection of signs on a light pole. Blue and white. Pointing in all directions. To the right: Dow Chemical Corporate Center. To the left: Dow Corning Michigan Site. Ahead: Alden B. Dow Home and Studio. Back behind them: Dow Gardens, Dow High School, and the Dow Library. “You weren’t kidding about the Dow connection, now were you?” she said.
“The last of the great company towns,” Corso said. “Turn right on Main.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Something little and out of the way. Something seedy. At least two stories, so we don’t have to be on the ground floor. Something where you’re either coming in through the door or you’re not coming in at all.”
“Sounds like another Timber Inn,” she said with a sneer.
“We’re not taking any chances this time,” Corso said. “These people kill the way other folks change their socks. We’re going to keep our distance. We turn anything, we call Molina and let the feds handle it.”
Downtown consisted of six blocks of renovated brick buildings running parallel to the river. Restaurants, gift shops, antique dealers, two banks, the Chamber of Commerce. Anyplace, USA.
The river’s rippled surface gleamed like fire in the late-afternoon sun. Dougherty pulled the visor down and used one hand to shade her eyes from the glare as she wheeled through the sparse traffic.
Corso pointed toward the far end of town. “Keep going,” he directed.
They found it a mile down. Across the street from a little green glen called Emerson Park. The Pine Tree Motor Inn and Café. Senior discount. Cable TV.
Room 223. Second floor back. Off the street. A non-smoking room that smelled of smoke. Long black burn marks graced both end tables. Dougherty checked the facilities. Wrinkled her nose. “I’d kill for my own bathroom,” she said.
Corso had both hands inside his bag. He looked up and nodded in agreement.
“Couple more days,” he said. “One way or the other.”
He came out with the mug shot and closed the bag.
“I’m going to make copies for tomorrow,” he announced.
Dougherty was putting her hair up behind her head. “Keys are on the dresser,” she said. “I’m gonna take a shower before dinner.”
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “Gordie won’t put up with it. You been here three days and he’s already bitching. Wants to know when you’re gonna leave.”
“I got no place else to go,” he whined. “I was thinkin’ maybe I could get on with the company. Like maybe Gordie could help me.”
She spit a bitter laugh. “Hell, that fool can’t hardly help himself, let alone you. He’s been with Dow for nineteen years and he’s still so low on the totem pole he’d have to look up to see dirt.” She cut the air with the side of her hand. “Spends all day down inside the vats, scrubbing with a brush, that’s what Mr. Big Shot does. That’s how come he’s got that smell to him. Been at it so long, the smell sunk right into his flesh. Can’t even wash it off no more. It’s enough to make me sick.”
“What am I gonna do?”
“How much money you got?”
“Eighteen hundred dollars.”
“We’ll go into town in the morning. We’ll—”
“Plus I get my check every month,” he interrupted.
“No more you don’t,” she said. “You try to cash one of those government checks, they’ll find you in a day.” She shook her head. “Nope. Time for you to fly away. Tomorrow morning we go into town. Do a little work. Make Tommie de Groot disappear off the face of the earth.”
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a baggie of loose tobacco.
“Do that outside,” she said. “You know how smoke pisses Gordie off. Son of a bitch can smell it before he gets out of the damn car.”
“Fuck Gordie,” he said sullenly. “Who needs him anyway.”
She poked him in the chest with a finger. “I do,” she said. “At least for right now.” He opened his mouth to speak, but she brought her finger to his lips. “I’m dug in here. You hear me? Don’t need anything messing it up, so you just mind your p’s and q’s, and don’t be making us any more trouble than we already got.”
“He gets in my face again I’m gonna fuck him up.”
She poked him hard enough to back him up one step. “You’ll do no such goddamn thing. Wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be here at all. You remember that.”
Dougherty held the wineglass to her lips and watched as Corso threw his napkin onto the table. “Not bad,” he announced.
“Hard to mess up a steak,” she said.
“It’s been done. Believe me.”
Her throat worked slowly as she swallowed the Meursault. She set the wineglass on the table, pulled the bottle from the ice bucket, and poured out the last drops.
“Another dead soldier,” she said, returning the empty bottle to the ice bucket. “I think we’re over our limit tonight.”
“We deserve it. It’s been a rough week.”
She downed the wine. Wiped her lips with the napkin.
“You ready?” he asked
.
She answered by sliding out of the booth. Corso threw a pile of twenties on the table, got to his feet, and followed her out the door.
A frozen wind rocked the door on its hinges. Corso had to use both hands to force it closed. Dougherty hooked her arm in his, and together they started up the sidewalk.
Three blocks up, the Pine Tree Motor Inn’s red neon vacancy sign glimmered in the night air. Dougherty leaned her head against his shoulder as they walked along.
“You ever wonder how we turned out like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Like a couple of adults who…for whatever reason just can’t seem to maintain a personal relationship with each other.”
“As I recall, that was your idea.” Corso threw an arm around her shoulders. “I believe you said I was ‘emotionally unavailable’ and therefore banned from the garden of earthly delights.”
“You are.”
“Lotta people can’t maintain relationships with each other,” he said, pulling her closer. “That’s what keeps therapists in business.”
“Yeah, but it usually doesn’t happen to people who are as fond of one another as you and I are.” She waved her free hand in the air. “Relationships aren’t perfect. Everybody has trouble now and then, but—”
“Are we fond of each other?”
“Stick it, Corso.”
They crossed the empty street against the light. “Downtown really clears out after dark,” Corso said. “Everybody lives out in the burbs. Just comes down here to work and shop.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Corso sighed. “If I admit it’s all my fault, can we talk about something else?”
“Nope.”
“Then I deny everything.”
“You’re like a turtle, Corso. You only come out of your shell long enough to make love. Then it’s right back inside.” Again she waved her hand. “It’s just not enough, Frank. I need more than that.”
“You ever seen a turtle without his shell?”
“I’m not kidding, damn it.”
“Me neither,” Corso said. “There’s no more pathetic-looking creature on earth than a turtle without his shell. Just this little sack of gristle with a head attached. Looks like it wasn’t properly gestated.”